Feeling Good 'Bout My Irregularity

I happened to stumble across the source code for an ASP-based open-source blogging app while I was looking for something else entirely* and I was struck by how regular and elegant the code was.

The code for Minx doesn't look like that.  Partly because I developed it relatively quickly and it's still on version 1.  But mostly, I realised a bit later, for another reason; for the same reason that the uncompressed source code for the entire system will still fit on a 360K floppy: I've squeezed all the regularity out.

A lot of the regularity in the code I was looking at was sequences of assignment statements - in Minx these are rolled up into loops, driven by tables.  I wrote my own SQL abstraction module for this reason.  It doesn't abstract the queries for me, but it completely abstracts the data.

I still want to prettify my code, but I feel happier now.

Also, while I was asleep I thought of a straightforward way to handle per-user/per-site customisation.  That will address a lot of limitations of working with a hosted system rather than your own custom app; it will allow per-user themes for blogs, for example.  I'll try to fit that in this coming week, along with the theme builder, site wizards, and AJAXulation.

* An open source web-based code display thingy**; turns out that SyntaxHighlighter is now LGPL and will do just fine.
** For an enhanced version of the [code] tag.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:04 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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